World class computing and information science research at Strathclyde...

The Strathprints institutional repository is a digital archive of University of Strathclyde's Open Access research outputs. Strathprints provides access to thousands of Open Access research papers by University of Strathclyde researchers, including by researchers from the Department of Computer & Information Sciences involved in mathematically structured programming, similarity and metric search, computer security, software systems, combinatronics and digital health.

The Department also includes the iSchool Research Group, which performs leading research into socio-technical phenomena and topics such as information retrieval and information seeking behaviour.

Abstract

This paper examines the small projects fund, an EU funded initiative to promote good citizen relations across borders.The paper presents the fund as an attempt to foster 'social capital', that is social trust and citizen networks, in the Polish-German border region. The fund is examined in the light of seven conditions of social capital formation. In the Polish-German border region, the fund scores well on the first on the first four conditions that are related to the promotion of individual trust. It performs less well on the three conditions for scaling up individual trust to form social capital. However, it remains to be seen whether small project support can deliver improved citizen relations.